The Art of The Order of Odd-Fish: Max Pitchkites’ Cut-Paper Scenes

In the summer of 2009 I discovered, via Twitter, some cool cut-paper art from The Order of Odd-Fish. The artist’s name is Max Pitchkites, and I was so impressed by what he’d done that I asked for more! This is some of the most brilliant, creative art that’s come out of Odd-Fish. In the space of just a few months, Max completed mixed-media scenes for every single chapter of the book. It’s a staggering accomplishment. If Max had been illustrating Odd-Fish from the get-go, I swear we’d be a shoo-in for the Caldecott Award. Check out his amazing work below.

Here’s a spectacular long shot of the vast, moldering ruby palace that Jo and Lily Larouche live in, lost amid the scorching California deserts—a perfect way to set the mood for what’s to come.

Max writes: “Since Aunt Lily has a very flamboyant personality, I decided that her house’s appearance needed to match that. Remember earlier how I said I was tempted to put PeeWee’s Playhouse somewhere in here? Well, I got my wish because that’s practically what this is. She may be rich enough to afford half a boat w/ a garden to put on her house, or she may just ramble on about a cuh-ray-zay story of how she somehow obtained it . . . I also had fun with the clouds, just innocently blooping past.”

I love the ridiculousness of Aunt Lily putting a boat in the middle of the desert! Very much in character for her. The surrounding mountains in the foreground and background give the palace an appropriate “hidden” feel, as well as the severely curved horizon. The skewed angles of the turrets and not-quite-level roofs add to the agreeable off-kilter vibe.

Max’s notes: “Since Lily Larouche is a former movie star, I thought it would be fitting to include old movie posters of movies that she was in on the attic’s walls. A mummy movie was mentioned, so I threw that in there . . . By the way, the stomach mysteriously taped to Korsakov’s gut is not really there, but seen through the eye of an x-ray. It also looks like a brain.”

I’m impressed at how perfectly Max captures the different characters’ personalities and attitudes: the quizzical, skeptical look on Jo’s face, Korsakov’s stern yet ludicrous manner, and how Sefino is ignoring them both while reading the newspaper—yup, that’s exactly what Sefino would be doing. The movie posters and x-ray of Korsakov’s digestion are nice subtle touches!

While Jo is trying to get through her day as a waitress at the Dust Creek Cafe, Lily Larouche’s magic trick unexpectedly goes haywire, and a senior citizen’s head starts whizzing around the room.

Max says that he’s “not completely fond of this one,” but I vigorously disagree. So many cool little touches—Jo’s foreshortened hand; reversing the grain of the background wall and lightening the color to quietly separate the two halves of the picture; the foregrounding of Mr. Cavendish’s head (who has a truly blissful-yet-maniacal grin, totally appropriate) and the hilarious impotence of the senior citizens underneath him; the foreshadowing with the fish mounted on the wall. And I also like that there’s a closet set aside exclusively for “things.”

Max also wanted to “sneak a lil’ Watchmen easter egg in there by putting a red streak across the smiley-face magnet on the fridge,” but he was prevented because the markers were too thick. I think it’s still a valid easter egg: whenever I see a yellow smiley-face these days, I immediately think of Watchmen by default.

The Chinese millionaire Ken Kiang shows up at Aunt Lily’s ruby palace, burns it down, and plays awful cacophonous music on Jo’s organ, all to get back his mysterious black box.

Another winner! The insane musical notation perfectly captures not only Ken Kiang’s organ playing, but his ridiculously baroque personality. And I like how Max uses newsprint to convey chaos, smoke, and jangled nerves. Max writes: “The book described Ken’s playing to be horrible and like mashing on the keys, so I used crumpled newspaper to convey that . . . By the way, I know absolutely nothing of music and the music on the right is purely for artistic purposes and has absolutely no musical merit. If it were to actually be played it would sound like a hideous cacophony. Especially since many of those symbols don’t belong on a musical staff.” (Maybe Brilliant Pebbles should reunite and give it a shot?)

Ken Kiang considering his wind-up antique donkey, shortly before deciding to become evil. Kiang’s bored, frustrated, peeved expression makes this one something special. And is it just me, or is his left eye just starting to raise up, as though an idea is about to strike him . . . ? The wind-up donkey has an hilariously blandly innocent expression, which I’m sure infuriates Kiang. I like the trash can of rejected ideas, the carefully grained wood, and the door placed far in the background to suggest the size of the room, but the masterstroke is Ken Kiang’s “emblem,” which Max invented and is ABSOLUTELY PERFECT. Simple, geometrical, evocative, clever, elegant. I easily see Ken Kiang emblazoning it on all his towels, socks, and underwear.

Ken Kiang and his minions chase after Jo & co. in the air, firing elegantly painted missiles and needlessly toying about before actually attempting to kill them. Max writes, “I was originally not sure how to do this scene, so I decided to do something a little more unorthodox by turning it into a game of Galaga . . . the missiles are supposed to be painted with the Crimean War and the Battle of Agincourt. I actually printed them out and made them an awkward missile-shape . . . I think the missiles should have been trailing classical music.” I say, in the words of another classic video game: FLAWLESS VICTORY! Just when I think I’ve seen everything in Max’s bag of tricks, we get this brilliance! I like how he worked in the Ken Kiang emblem he invented for chapter 5—and appropriating artwork from the actual historical battles for the missiles is inspired.

Ken Kiang takes Hoagland Shanks to an exclusive French restaurant to tempt him with avant-garde pies. Max wrote, “I know that they’re pies and not candies, but I had a large pillowcase full of Halloween candy and I thought it’d be interesting to put it into my art. It fits in a way.” Here Max has upped the ante of inventiveness yet again and sailed into almost pure abstraction! Some of these ingenious pies look like monsters from a side-scroller like Super Mario Bros.; the pie-within-a-pie-within-a-pie is probably the world’s first example of a recursive pastry; not to mention the radioactive pie! And the pie made entirely out of music! And the pie that seems to be made out of someone’s love life problems . . . the pie that is a kind of 404 error . . . the pie that is a bold refutation of Magritte’s “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” . . . Good show again!

This is a version of the first art I saw of Max’s: the pivotal scene when the giant fish vomits the Odd-Fish lodge onto the beach near Eldritch City. I was so impressed I asked him to do similar art for all the chapters. I was honored and excited that he accepted. A great start to a brilliant series!

I was wondering how Max would tackle Chapter 9, the Grand Feast of the Order of Odd-Fish, since he’d already done a feast picture for Chapter 28. With characteristic boldness Max disregards the feast altogether and zeroes in on a single crucial detail of the chapter—the workings of the mysterious Inconvenience device—thus venturing even further down the path of abstraction he embraced in Chapter 7.

This looks to me like the mysterious “terrifying documents” that Sir Festus stumbled across describing how the Inconvenience is constructed. Max explains, “When they were explaining the Inconvenience in the book I immediately thought of it on a mathematical, scientific schematic . . . I tried to make the circle around the box to be reminiscent of Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man.” Deft and subtle reference! There’s more clever mixed-media appropriation, as Max repurposes old Borders receipts to make the composition look, as he says, “more math-y.” A gleeful mashup of Vitruvian Man, a 1980s video game, the mandala for some severely confused religion, and a Venusian barometer.

In this chapter the Belgian Prankster tells Ken Kiang the gruesome story of Jo’s birth (with the help of a homemade film). Max skillfully depicts the effect Jo’s supernatural birth has on her house: “It was as if some invisible hand were squeezing the house, stretching and twisting it as if it were taffy. The bricks were melting, dripping down the sides in streams . . . The house strained at the seams, swelling, heaving, gurgling.”

Max writes that it would be more horrifying “with monsters and tentacles and stuff, but when I tried adding surrealism it ended up looking cluttered and awkward.” But he did manage to include “an eyeball doorknob, which would be Alex’s iconic eye from A Clockwork Orange. I threw that in there not only because I simply love the book (haven’t seen the movie yet) but also that chapter kind of reminded me of it: Ken Kiang, though not completely forced, had to sit down and watch a most gruesome tale unfold on a gritty screen in a darkened room.” I like the connection! (I, too, am an admirer of Anthony Burgess.)

Jo and Ian ride an elephant down to the Municipal Squires’ Authority, where they will be made squires. I felt pure delight when I saw this one. Max captures beautifully the lush, alien, whimsical feeling I wanted to give Eldritch City. Also the subtle suggestion of a video-game, in keeping with a theme throughout this series (all those Mario-like mushrooms, the elephant moving left to right like a side-scroller). It made me realize I’d love to play a game designed by Max with this kind of graphic sensibility. What a buoyant, happy, vivid scene! The whale submarine is a satisfying cherry on top, or bottom, as it were (and a reference to the whale-god on page 170?)

A nangnang gets loose at the Municipal Squires’ Authority and wreaks havoc. Jo, now a freshly-minted squire, manages to bring the monster under control, but only after it gnaws off her fingernail.

Another brilliant stylistic innovation. I appreciate the shift from last chapter’s lush jumble to this chapter’s clean simplicity. This mysterious design looks like the cover of some 1960s-1970s acid rock album, or the cryptic emblem of a chic secret society. The way Jo’s finger is bleeding—flowing upwards in perfect weightless bubbles—is more gripping, memorable, and appealing than a straightforward “realistic” picture of bleeding. This would be my choice for the cover of Odd-Fish if there was ever an “adult” version of it. (Remember how when Harry Potter came out, some adults were embarrassed to be reading about a boy wizard, so the book was also published with more subtle covers?)

Jo runs across two accounts of the myth of her monstrous birth. One is part of the miles-long tapestry that is the repository of all Eldritch City myths. The other is a cheaply-made, seedy, but wildly popular show called Teenage Ichthala, episodes of which are bought on the black market or passed among friends like pop-culture samizdat.

Here Max cleverly splices the tapestry and Teenage Ichthala together! For some reason Max’s style keeps reminding me of video games: the various denizens trawling across alternating bands of color remind me of early Atari 2600 efforts like Air-Sea Battle. Max ably gives us a sense of the chaotic richness of the tapestry: a jellyfish, space invader, tsunami, dinosaur, conflagration, vortex, witch-doctor skull . . . The black-and-white cels from an episode of Teenage Ichthala adroitly catch the feel I wanted, of a grainy, scratched, old-timey 1930s film.

Chapter 14Eldritch Shenanigans
by Max Pitchkites

I love this one! I’ve often considering making a map of Eldritch City—fantasy books have to have maps, right? it’s a rule—but never got around to it. Here Max makes it all easy for me. He explains that Chapter 14 was “just a small string of Jo’s episodic adventures within the city. So I decided to make a map with Jo’s annotations that intertwine with those several events.” Brilliant idea to include Jo’s personal notes, including events from outside the chapter, like the pig-icon for the zoo (“I will never go to a nangnang exhibit there. EVER”) inspired by Jhonen Vasquez’s comics. Max also writes, “The kanji on the orange continent means ‘festival’ (provided the internet didn’t lie to me) since Eldritch City and its festivals are based on Japan and its festivals.” The internet didn’t lie; that is indeed the kanji for matsuri. I like how certain elements repeat and develop throughout this series, as when Max says, “The Mario mushroom houses reappeared from On Their Way (Chapter 11), and since that’s from a Nintendo game, I decided to make the Muncipal Squires’ Authority shaped somewhat like the Temple of Time from the Legend of Zelda Games (Ocarina of Time version especially) since the MSA headquarters lies within a dilapidated temple.”

WOW! Every once in a while in this series I feel Max leveling-up to a new rank of achievement. This is definitely one of those moments. Here it feels like he’s brought the instincts on form and composition that he sharpened with his more abstract entries, and combined it with the lively personality of his more concrete pictures, to make something that goes beyond both. I love the triumphant swirling energy of the Schwenk as he flies through the air, and the awestruck, gobsmacked citizens of Eldritch City watching it—great idea to make them multicolored silhouettes, so that focus remains on the Schwenk. And again the very landscape curves to emphasize the motion of the swirling Schwenk. This is a triumph!

Ken Kiang invites Hoagland Shanks over to his Manhattan castle to discuss weighty matters of destiny and pie; step one of Ken’s evil plan to send Hoagland Shanks to hell.

There’s something irresistibly expressionistic and rather scary about this one. In the book the meeting happens in an ordinary office, but Max explains, “I placed their chairs and desk on two precipices to symbolize the tension between the two parties, and the superimposed pie above being a mixture of their thoughts—Shanks’ thoughts of pie, and Ken’s thoughts of sending him to Hell.” Very effective, and not a little creepy. Max complains that he doesn’t like the layered effect of the sharpies, but I do. It looks like those great slabs of color are sweating, or melting, only adding to the tension. Max also finds a way to work in Ken Kiang’s logo that he invented in chapter 5 and brought out again in chapter 6. It’s careful little touches like that which knit the whole series together in such a satisfying way.

Spectacular, mysterious, and irresistibly pulls the eyes forward. Max wisely just shows the squids, instead of cluttering up the composition by explicitly showing Jo, Ian, and Nick riding them. Max writes, “That arch you see there is really a huge mouth, and the tiny arches within being the outside world and the sunlight from outside . . . As I was making this, the mouth-arch seemed to me like a red McDonald’s arch, so I like to think of this as a Lynchian, Vasquezian ride into an underground nightmare-McDonald’s.” Underground nightmare-McDonald’s! There’s another whole book in that little phrase—quite probably, a better one.

Max also writes that there is a “rather blatant” Easter egg hidden in the picture. Can you find it?

In this chapter, Nora gets a hold of some scripts from the uncannily prophetic show Teenage Ichthala and discovers the true depth and terror of the Belgian Prankster’s plans for Jo.

Scary, lurid, and weird! Max writes, “The noseless Belgian Prankster here looks like a cannibalistic hobo clown thing . . . I don’t know if this is how James envisioned him.” Yup. As usual, he nailed it. The extreme closeup to the grotesque face, the nightmarish wash of colors, and the crammed, upside-down text give it all a super-creepy vibe. You can feel the Belgian Prankster’s presence lurking behind each word of the script. The split composition is a nice reference to Max’s illustration for Chapter 25, and now that I think about it, it also reminds me of the cover of Alan Moore’s Batman graphic novel, The Killing Joke. Prankster, Joker . . . highly appropriate!

Jo and Ian visit the seedy prizefighting venue known as the Dome of Doom and are menaced by “a ferocious man with blue skin and a face bristling with grotesque moles, decked out in an ornate military uniform from an army that existed only in his overheated imagination, with a helmet of equal parts chrome and crocodile skin.” (It turns out to be Audrey in disguise.)

Max never makes the expected choice for an illustration; it’s always something more interesting! I’m a sucker for the multicolored silhouettes, which Max cleverly exploits in the same way cinematographers use deep focus. The monstrous shadows give it a foreboding Star Wars cantina feeling, and the overlapping yellow-orange-red layers in the background give it visual depth, but the hilarious, nostalgic masterstroke is—well, I’ll let Max have the last word, because it’s seven kinds of genius: “Since this is the Dome of Doom, I decided to, well, turn it into a game of Doom, which is an old but spectacularly awesome first person shooter game. I’m sorry for the horrible pun, but it had to happen, even if the gods told me not to. (Jo is armed with that vile glass of black milk that the blue guy is so upset about, by the way. And 50 shots, to boot.)” TOP-NOTCH.

Chapter 20Sabotage
by Max Pitchkites

In this chapter, Ken Kiang plots his intricate sabotage of the Belgian Prankster’s plans—and a musical, to boot. Max beautifully combines both ideas in this dreamlike music notation, which is also a sly reference to his earlier illustration Ken Kiang’s first appearance in Chapter 4. All of Ken Kiang’s methods of sabotaging the plan (backing up documents, tightening bolts, doubling keys, etc.) are represented here; it also ingeniously references how Eldritch City becomes a giant, intricate chess game between Ken Kiang and the Belgian Prankster—note Ken Kiang and his pawns, knights, etc. to the left, and the huge, overpowering Belgian Prankster on the right in red with his pieces. Daring, imaginative, and totally true to the spirit of the chapter! I love it when something is both a conceptual triumph and beautiful to look at. Max takes risks, and they pay off.

Here’s the scene where Jo decodes a secret message from her father in the Odd-Fish archives. I must admit, this one is embarrassing for me, because Max exposes a mistake in the book! When I wrote this scene, I described Jo’s ring as being gold. But Aunt Lily’s ring is gold; Jo’s ring is silver! Max, in strict fidelity to the erroneous text, makes the ring gold, but he kindly pointed out my mistake. Hopefully I can fix it in later editions!

Jo enters the lodge of the Order of Wormbeards, which the book describes as “a pit two hundred yards deep and fifty feet square, dotted with windows on every side, and filled by a great glistening tree . . . the tree filled up the pit with glittering branches, supporting a staircase descending to the bottom.” Max writes “That winding brown thing at the bottom is a staircase, but looks more like a slope. Whatever. They perform the same function. It was also supposed to be gray, but my gray sharpie died on me.” I like the spiraling vertiginous point of view from the top of the stairs; the unbalanced perspective makes me feel like I’m going to lose my footing and tumble down all the steps!

At the Founders’ Day festival, Ken Kiang interrupts Sir Alasdair’s concert and kicks off his own self-aggrandizing musical. The crowd unanimously hates Ken Kiang’s inept performance and threatens to riot. I love the perfectly well-placed thumbs-down from the silhouetted crowd member, and the hastily altered marquee. Ken Kiang’s head looks like an “I”; my theory was that it was because of his overweening egotism.

Jo secretly visits the lunatic asylum where the Belgian Prankster is being held. This is one of my favorites in Max’s series—Max is really hitting his stride here. He writes of this piece, “Took a while . . . my hands and lungs are stained with sharpie ink. Looks more like a birthday party, but whatever. People have cocktails and are partyin’, so mission accomplished I guess. And I know that that cross is a medical sign and (if I recall correctly) is not used in mental hospitals. Shaddap. So how many of y’all are excited about Pig 3?”

I think Max has perfectly captured how weird and disturbing that cocktail party is supposed to be. Heather (my wife) took one look at it and exclaimed “Nightmare!” The inmate taking a swing at a fish pinata is a fantastic touch. One of Max’s strengths is extrapolating what’s in the chapter to discover things that I didn’t necessarily write, but totally fit. Jo’s expression is a great example of using fewest lines for maximum effect: surprise, determination, and terror just with two lines, two dots, and the way she’s holding the knife. I almost feel like this is from the point of view of the Belgian Prankster in the back of the room, waiting for Jo to come to him.

Jo finds herself blacking out and having nightmarish visions of the Belgian Prankster in the middle of her duel. I like the way the Ichthala blood is visibly corrupting Jo’s flesh here, sending roots into her body as she panics. There’s something desperate and terrified about Jo in this that I find compelling. Max said that he plans to redo this chapter with more emphasis on the duel proper, but I think this sums up Jo’s frantic state of mind in the chapter quite well.

Definitely one of my favorites! The inhabitants of Eldritch City surround the Odd-Fish lodge, where Jo and Audrey are hiding, demanding they come out and give themselves up to the Silent Sisters. Max writes, “Did more newspaper experimenting . . . Since I couldn’t effectively put in billowing smoke as described in the book (which probably would have made it less pretty anyway) I instead crumpled up the paper and the moon to show that something is amiss. The only problem with this is that some sections of the crumpled paper are distanced from the scanner and are therefore blurry.” I would respond that the blurriness actually enhances the “smoky” effect. I also love the sad-face Molotov cocktail and the snowman looking furtively over his shoulder at it. I think it’s a cool move to put the viewer not in Jo’s POV, but in the POV of the raging mob. The multicolored background metropolis is a vivid, fantastical place—mushroom house! multicolored stacked minaret! yes!

A hands-down favorite. This one is brilliant. The All-Devouring Mother Icthala rampages throughout Eldritch city, causing chaos and destruction everywhere. Max’s All-Devouring Mother is a gorgeous masterpiece. He writes, “With this beast here I was going for sort of a fusion between the Dairy Queen mouth and Yog Sothoth . . . That moon there is actually a grease stain from a cookie. I was eating some, and set it down on a sheet of paper and accidentally got a stain. This accident lead to the creation of a moon!” I draw your attention to the giant bowl with two chopsticks sticking up out of it, right above the explosion, a nice reference to “eating” the city—and also Japanese funeral rituals, in which chopsticks are stuck vertically into the rice. Looking closely at the newsprint TV listings in the background, I can pick out “End of Days,” “Rampage!”, “All Growed Up” to the left. All totally appropriate—and according to Max, a complete coincidence!

A feast is held in celebration of Jo’s recovery and defeating the horrors that threatened Eldritch City. A fitting final piece to what is shaping up to be a remarkable achievement. Max writes, “You see those three stained glass windows back there? Eldritch City has a colossal number of gods in their culture, and I decided it would only fit to put them on stained glass windows. Whether or not the giant vomit-fish near the beginning is a god or not, I decided to put it on there anyway because it fit. Besides, the Odd-Fish must be named after a fish of some description right? And the other two flaking the latter are my own inventions: A banana vampire and a big headed blue clown snake . . . In one of the earlier chapters, one of the characters is described as ‘like a big sausage thinly disguised as a person.’ If you’re anything like me, you’ll immediately assume people actually ARE giant sausages and begin applying such a stereotype to human beings by portraying them as such. Which is what I did to that lil’ fella down there at the bottom left, whose name I can’t remember since it was such an early chapter.” The name of the character is Sir Alasdair, and Max did him perfectly. I love how the guy who looks like a sausage is eating . . . a sausage. Glad to see Ethelred made the party, too. And Ken Kiang has an appropriately discomfited expression. I take it the other knights are Korsakov, Sir Festus, and Dame Delia. Absolutely first-rate—a great end to a great series! UPDATE: Hey, wait a second . . . is that the Belgian Prankster lurking outside the window?! SPOOKY. Especially since I never noticed it the first hundred times I looked at this picture!